Join the Lab
Graduate Students
Dr. Raby will be considering graduate student applications for the 2025-2026 cycle (i.e., to begin the fall of 2026). Students would primarily be involved in the BABY and SNUGL studies for which data are currently being collected.
Students will gain substantive expertise in the consequences of early experiences—including those related to the parent-child attachment relationship and broader factors related to parents’ mental health and socioeconomic status— for individuals’ physiological functioning, cognitive skills, and socioemotional development. Students will also be trained in the collection and cleaning of autonomic and cortisol data as well as coding of attachment assessments, parenting behavior, and child emotion regulation.
Students are mentored in individual projects that they present international research conferences and submit for publication. Students have the opportunity to work with existing longitudinal data collected in the lab, including early waves of data from BABY that focused on pregnant women’s’ adjustment during the third trimester of pregnancy, newborns’ neurobiological functioning, and infants’ development at seven and 18 months of age. At each of these waves, multi-level data (including observation, autonomic physiology, interviews, and questionnaires) pertaining to emotional regulation, attachment relationships, and contextual factors were collected. Studies will also have the opportunity to work with existing longitudinal data that Dr. Raby is involved with. Students are also mentored in grant writing to support their own independent projects.
Students interested in applying are encouraged to contact Dr. Raby to discuss the fit between their research interests and graduate school goals and the training opportunities in the lab.
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Undergraduate research assistants are an important element to our research. Students in our lab gain hands-on experience collecting diverse types of data from parents and young child, cleaning physiological data (such as heart rate), coding observations of parent-child interactions, entering data, and preparing data files that will be analyzed to answer research questions. The research experience and skills gained from working in the Early Experiences Lab are applicable to many different career paths. Previous research assistants from our lab have gone on to graduate programs in education, social work, school counseling, developmental psychology, and Industrial/Organizational psychology.
Interested in joining?
The requirements for research assistants in the lab are:
- 3.25 GPA
- 8-10 hours of per week of lab work (depending on assigned projects)
- A two-semester commitment (one of those semesters can include the summer)
- Be interested in developmental psychology or a related area
- Be self-motivated and dependable
